f you could pick any two 20th Century literary critics or authors to sit down with for a bite and chat, you could do much worse than Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. Kenner was a Canadian scholar born in Ontario to scholarly parents. He studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, then under Cleanth Brooks at Yale. In 1948 he made personal acquaintance with Ezra Pound while the poet was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital outside of Washington D.C. And, as the cartoon pig says, that's all folks: it was Modernism for Kenner from there on out, both its advocacy and explication. Fellow-modernist Davenport was a polymathic fiction writer, scholar, painter, poet, etc. from South Carolina who, upon graduating from Duke University, studied under J.R.R. Tolkien as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Afterwards, he earned his PhD from Harvard. Davenport also visited Pound at St. Elizabeths. Davenport and Kenner met in 1953 delivering papers on Pound at a conference at Columbia University. From there began a conversation which included over a thousand letters and, though tapering in their final years, didn't end until Kenner's death in 2003 (Davenport died two years later, in 2005).
Counterpoint press' collection of Kenner and Davenport's correspondence—Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns—documents this decades-long conversation. The letters are frank, candid expressions of two creative geniuses, most dating from the apex of their powers (mid-50's through the mid-70's, roughly). The personal experiences of the two men weave themselves beautifully around intense and erudite cultural observations which it takes time and attention to fully appreciate. An initial chaos of associations, after careful reading and the development of perspective, reveals itself to be more of a tapestry, synthesizing the story of two unique personalities and their adventures through the rich landscape of Western culture.
Beautiful, moving, and lively as this collection is, it's also a hefty tome, at roughly one thousand pages (and costing over $60). But the temporal and financial investment is well worth it. Modernism—as we find it in the works of Yeats, Pound, Joyce, and Eliot—is the last Western literary tradition to recognize itself as such. It's also the last to coherently work within a larger Western cultural tradition. It might even have been the last literary movement to put American and World literature in vigorous conversation. As such, there's something here for everyone. For the aesthete, master stylists. For the biographer, a wild garden of facts. For the casual reader, the glittering personalities. For the serious student of literature, wisdom.
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